Better than concrete. Light-weight fitness floating floor solutions for reducing impacts

Abstract

Structure-borne noise and vibration from weight drops and fitness activities are an ever-increasing source of disturbance within multi-residential, hospitality, and multi-tenant commercial buildings. High-mass floating floors supported on low-resonant frequency isolators have been used with good effect to reduce impact noise and vibration, but commonly require expensive supplemental supports or structural stiffening to be implemented properly. Common light-touch fitness solutions feature continuous or interlocking resilient surface treatment. This approach is often ineffectual at high-energy impact fitness areas and the pursuit of soft surface solutions to achieve greater dissipation of impact energy can create an unstable surface for weightlifting. An alternate approach to reducing structure-borne noise exists which focuses on dissipating the impact energy through constrained layer damping in conjunction with low-resonant frequency isolators. Research and development testing shows that an engineered all-dry lightweight fitness floating floor is capable of achieving equal or greater impact insulation performance than a high-mass concrete floating floor and significantly better performance than light-touch resilient surface treatment. A review of the testing and development process and underlying principles will be reviewed to illuminate the mechanisms at work in the next generation of fitness floating floors.